Sunday, May 29, 2011

Sony believes it knows how a hacker penetrated its online entertainment networks in an incident that exposed 100 million customer accounts, the company said in a letter to U.S. lawmakers released today.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

The new top-end model from medium-format camera maker Hasselblad is now on the market, and it's not cheap: the 200-megapixel H4D-200MS will set you back 32,000 euros, or about $45,000.

The camera actually uses a sensor with a mere 50 megapixels, but with Hasselblad's multishot technology combines six shots into one. That means moving subjects such as fashion models need not apply. But a lot of this very high-end photography involves static subjects such as jewelry, watches, cars, and paintings for reproduction.

Hasselblad announced the H4D-200MS last September at the Photokina show. At the time, the company said it hoped to release the camera in the first quarter.

The multishot technique isn't as crude as taking a bunch of shots and stitching them together. Instead, it works with a piezoelectric motor that moves the camera's image sensor a tiny amount before taking each photo.

The six-shot extended multishot mode augments an earlier option, the four-shot multishot mode. The multihsot modes offset each frame by a half or a full pixel width, an approach that compensates for the fact that each sensor pixel captures only red, green, or blue light. The four-shot mode takes about 20 seconds for a full photo; the six-shot mode takes about 30 seconds. Yes, you need a tripod.

Expensive luxury products are a core market for medium-format photography. Jonathan Beer took this shot with an H4D-200MS in its highest-resolution configuration.

Microsoft issued a retraction of Chief Executive Steve Ballmer's claims this week that Windows 8 would arrive in 2012 on tablets and PCs.
The Redmond, Wash., company said Ballmer misspoke and even backed off the next release of its Windows operating system being called Windows 8.
In aWednesday email from a company spokeswoman, Microsoft said:

It appears there was a misstatement. We are eagerly awaiting the next generation of Windows 7 hardware that will be available in the coming fiscal year. To date, we have yet to formally announce any timing or naming for the next version of Windows.

On Monday, at a Microsoft developers conference in Tokyo, Ballmer said Windows 8 (as he called it) would arrive next year on many different devices.

We've done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand-new user interface. We've added touch and ink and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there's a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors.

It now seems Ballmer either didn't know what he was talking about, or he spoke too soon.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

In an effort to help scientists discover how life began, NASA announced on Wednesday that it's working to send a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid in 2016.

The $800 million mission, which will call on a robot to collect pieces of the asteroid (see NASA illustration), will be the first U.S. mission to carry asteroid samples back to Earth.
Expected to launch in 2016, the spacecraft is scheduled to reach the asteroid (dubbed 1999 RQ36) by 2020 and then return to Earth in 2023.

"This is a critical step in meeting the objectives outlined by President Obama to extend our reach beyond low-Earth orbit and explore into deep space," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, in a written statement. "It's robotic missions like these that will pave the way for future human space missions to an asteroid and other deep space destinations."

"This asteroid is a time capsule from the birth of our solar system and ushers in a new era of planetary exploration," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said in a written statement. "The knowledge from the mission also will help us to develop methods to better track the orbits of asteroids."

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Twitter is finally buying TweetDeck for more than $40 million in cash and stocks. TweetDeck is a third-party client for the Twitter and It is the most popular Twitter application with a 19% market share as of June 2009, following only the official Twitter.com website with 45.70% share for posting new status updates.

The purchase isn't official yet and neither of the company has publically spoken about this deal.

On Monday night Twitter's PR employee tweeted "For all those who might be curious, we continue to not comment on rumors."
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter might buy TweetDeck.
A few months ago there was a report that UberMedia, the top developer of apps and Web-based services for Twitter users and other social media platforms, was in chat to acquire Tweetdeck. However, the deal didn't go through.
Twitter has known to either downplay third-party apps or purchase them outright.
TweetDeck would be an important tool for either service, as it's now one of the most popular clients.

Monday, May 23, 2011

So there you have the first official Modern Warfare 3 trailer, and is here to blow up everything everywhere.

In the trailer, New York gets seriously messed up, with combat helicopters flying at street level. England's underground rail system is going to need a lot of repairs. Soldiers in France engage in guerrilla warfare, while entire buildings are brought down in Germany.

While Google made reference to forthcoming desktops running its Chrome OS at its recent I/O conference, the company provided few specifics. Xi3 has since filled that breach by announcing that its ChromiumPC will be the first desktop to run the operating system when it launches in early July.

Xi3 had designed a modular architecture for the ChromiumPC, which means that it consists of processor and I/O modules rather than a traditional motherboard. Further, the I/O modules — one for communications ports and the second for other connectivity — are swappable.

Though few specs are known for the ChromiumPC, it will use an x86-based processor — either single or dual-core — and be released in several color choices. Xi3 says third parties are interested in creating their own modules, and flavors of ChromiumPC running other operating systems will also be available.

Xi3 says it will disclose more information about the ChromiumPC — including, presumably, its price — before the launch date, so we’ll know more for Chrome adherents to decide if they will want to plunk down some money to get a desktop device to run the alternative operating system.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

In the past, both data and software had to be stored and processed on or near the computer. The development of Local Area Networks allowed for a system in which multiple CPUs and storage devices may be organized to increase the performance of the entire system.

In an extension to that concept, cloud computing fundamentally allows for a functional separation between the resources used and the user's computer, usually residing outside the local network, for example, in a remote datacenter.

Cloud computing refers to the on-demand provision of computational resources (data, software) via a computer network, rather than from a local computer. Users or clients can submit a task, such as word processing, to the service provider, without actually possessing the software or hardware.

The consumer's computer may contain very little software or data (perhaps a minimal operating system and web browser only), serving as little more than a display terminal connected to the Internet. Since the cloud is the underlying delivery mechanism, cloud based applications and services may support any type of software application or service in use today.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Rovio sent its wildly popular title, Angry Birds, to the Web last week via Google’s Chrome browser. The game has two levels with several stages to play through.
The first level features the puzzles from the Angry Birds app, while the second level offers some Chrome-specific challenges and is littered with Chrome logos that give you a bonus when you hit them.

The gameplay is the same as with all iterations of Angry Birds, though touchscreen users may appreciate the bit of extra control a mouse offers. You don’t have to use Chrome to play the game. Although it is available in the browser’s Web store, users can find it through chrome.angrybirds.com. Free for all platforms, though there are paid versions with more levels.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) that is designed to succeed Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The Internet operates by transferring data in small packets that are independently routed across networks as specified by an international communications protocol known as the Internet Protocol. Each data packet contains two numeric addresses that are the packet's origin and destination devices.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

So, I just saw Tron. It is a sequel to the 1982 film Tron with Jeff Bridges reprising his roles as Kevin Flynn and CLU, while Bruce Boxleitner reprises his roles as Alan Bradley and Tron. Garrett Hedlund portrays Flynn's adult son, Sam.

The other cast members include Olivia Wilde, Beau Garrett, Michael Sheen, and James Frain. The film's soundtrack was composed by the electronic music duo Daft Punk. The film grossed over $400 million worldwide.